Reaping the Rotten Fruit

by Thomas A. Droleskey

By their fruits you shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit, and the evil tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can an evil tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit, shall be cut down, and shall be cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits you shall know them. (Mt. 7: 17-20)

Either make the tree good and its fruit good: or make the tree evil, and its fruit evil. For by the fruit the tree is known. O generation of vipers, how can you speak good things, whereas you are evil? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. A good man out of a good treasure bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of an evil treasure bringeth forth evil things.  (Mt. 33-35)

The seeds sown by the novelties and errors of the Second Vatican Council are producing a thoroughly rotten and bitter harvest. Catholics were driven out of the Church in droves as a result of the imposition of the first synthetically created liturgy in her history. Thousands more were driven out of the Church as that synthetic liturgy mutated continuously over the decades into one outrageous spectacle after another. Still more were driven out of the Church as a result of the denial of articles contained in the Deposit of Faith from our pulpits and in our schools. Yet more were driven out of the Church as a result of the scandals that had their origin in the systematic recruitment, protection and promotion of perverts into the priesthood and the episcopate. Randy Engel's forthcoming book, The Rite of Sodomy — Homosexuality and the Roman Catholic Church, will document the extent to which blackmail and extortion were used to get perverts consecrated as bishops and to keep them in place as one article of the Faith after another was denied in diocese after diocese throughout the world, especially here in the United States of America.

Ken Jones's The Index of Leading Catholic Indicators demonstrated three years ago in stark, incontrovertible empirical terms just how the the Catholic Church has suffered statistically in the past forty years. Although some, including the current Holy Father, would like to think that we are experiencing a "qualitative renewal" in the "springtime of the Church," the devastating reality is that this is the first time in the history of the Church that her leaders are speaking about a loss of numbers of Catholics as indicative of something healthy. The Church has always been concerned, at least until 1958, about adding new members to her ranks and about converting everyone in the whole world to Catholicism. The Church has always cared about numbers because she cares about every soul on the face of the earth. She has sought to add souls to her ranks from her very birthday on Pentecost Sunday:

But Peter said to them: ‘Do penance, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ, for the remission of your sins: and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. For the promise is to you, and to your children, and to all that are far off, whomsoever the Lord our God shall call.’

“And with very many other words did he testify and exhort them, saying: ‘Save yourselves from this perverse generation.’

“They therefore that received his word, were baptized; and there were added in that day about three thousand souls.” (Acts 2:38-41)

Three thousand souls. God cares about numbers. Otherwise, you see, His book, the Bible, would not be full of numbers. The examples from the Old Testament are just too numerous to review in this brief reflection. God made the world in six days, resting on the seventh. Noah spent forty days and forty nights in the ark. The Hebrews were enslaved to the Egyptians for 440 years. The Jews spent forty years wandering in the desert. The thousands slain by Saul, the tens of thousands slain by David. And one of the books of the Pentateuch happens to be called The Book of Numbers. Yes, numbers are important to God.

The tradition of the Church teaches us that God cares about numbers, which are indeed something of an indicator of the health of the Church Militant here on earth. Over 10,000 people who had gone over to the Albigensians came back to the Faith after Saint Dominic was given the Rosary by Our Lady. Saint Francis de Sales brought back between 60,000 and 72,000 Calvinists to the Catholic Church by means of his preaching. Saint Peter Claver baptized over 300,000 people in his lifetime. Saint Francis Xavier destroyed over 40,000 pagan idols (many of which have made their way into Papal events these days) baptized over 3,000,0000 people. That’s right, three million, And, quite importantly, over nine million indigenous peoples of the Americas were converted to the true Faith in a short space of time following Our Lady’s apparition to Saint Juan Diego at Guadalupe on December 9, 1531, almost person for the person the number of people lost to the Church in Europe as a result of the Protestant Revolt.

Thus,  Pope Benedict XVI's assertions about a “qualitative” renewal of the Church are now and have always been an exercise in spin doctoring that flies in the face of God’s Word and of the authentic patrimony of the Catholic Church. The wreckage caused by the Second Vatican Council and the Novus Ordo Missae is vast. The decline in the numbers of Catholic attending Mass, of those who believe in the articles contained in the Deposit of Faith, of the numbers of priests and consecrated religious has not occurred because the Church has been preaching forcefully unpopular truths and seeking to gain converts to the Faith. This decline in numbers has occurred precisely because the Church has abandoned her authentic patrimony, expressed her contempt for the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, and treated actual schismatics and heretics and pagans and infidels with great solicitude while those who have held to the Faith our fathers have been dealt heavy and severe blows.

It is no wonder, therefore, that men who have lost the sensus fidei are acting like corporate executives rather than the Successors of the Apostles. Rather than to seek converts (yes, there's that forbidden word again) to fill the pews of  urban parishes which have seen large numbers of parishioners move to the suburbs, our cardinals and archbishops and bishops have chosen to close parishes and to sell them in many instances to the highest bidders. The rot of the conciliarist novelty of ecumenism is such that even the thought of attempting to convert Protestants and Mormons and Seventh Day Adventists and Jews and Mohammedans and Hindus and Buddhists and atheists to the true Faith never occurs to the bright lights in nicely furnished  and neatly-appointed chancery offices. No, conversion is simply not a "practical" solution to people who speak in such materialistic, naturalistic terms as "economies of scale." The financial bottom line is what matters the most. All supernatural considerations are dismissed as irrelevant to the "realities" of the present day.

Thus it is that Edward Cardinal Egan, the Archbishop of New York, who has closed a number of parishes in the six years of his episcopal reign in the Archdiocese of New York, including the historic Saint Ann's Church on East 12th Street, has announced that an additional fifteen parishes will be closed by this summer. Another sixteen existing parishes will become "missions" or "chapels" associated with other parishes, meaning that they will lose a full-time pastor and will have Masses offered there only on weekends and Holy Days of Obligation. The Archdiocese plans to build new churches in eight locations to relieve "overcrowding" in certain parishes. The fact, however, that any Catholic parish must be "closed" or "consolidated" is simply a testimony to the thoroughly rotten fruit of the erroneous novelty of ecumenism, to say nothing of the indolence it has bred in the souls of so many urban and suburban priests, who should be about the business of evangelizing everyone in their parish's boundaries rather than sitting in their rectories in their La-Z-Boy recliner chairs as they watch the Fox News Channel. Imagine if Saint Patrick, the Patron Saint of the Archdiocese of New York, was content to leave the Druids alone in Ireland! He converted souls. He converted Ireland. Why is his holy example not applicable in our own day today?

Father Daniel Johnson, who was pastor of Saint Mary's by the Sea Church in Huntington Beach, California, from 1979 to 2004, personally walked the boundaries of his parish three times in his twenty-five year pastorate, knocking on every single door, residential and commercial, in the process. Serving as the instrumentality of the Holy Ghost, Father Johnson brought in 557 people to the Church through his old-fashioned convert-instruction classes (as opposed to the Rite of Christian Initiation as Adults program). Among those converted were Protestants, Jews, Mormons, Buddhists, and Mohammedans. There is no telling how many more people came back to the Faith as a result of Father Daniel Johnson's zeal for souls, which included strong exhortations for all Catholics to embrace the Immemorial Mass of Tradition in which he was ordained and to which he was so very devoted. Father Johnson thus turned a small outpost in the Diocese of Orange into a thriving parish, one that has now been decimated in the past two years by the actions taken by Bishop Tod Brown, who has never once acknowledged publicly the great service to souls performed by Father Johnson. No, no. Bishop Brown is too busy according Papal Knighthoods to pro-abortion Jewish rabbis, you understand.

Father Daniel Johnson's zeal for souls appears extraordinary in today's world of ecumenism and religious liberty. Actually, he was only doing his duty as a Catholic priest. Father Johnson understood that he had the obligation to win new souls for Our Lord and the Church He founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. He knew that he could not go before Our Lord at the moment of his own Particular Judgment without having to render an account as to how he had tried, at the very least, to bring more and more souls into the Church. Father Johnson's pastoral zeal simply mirrored that of the Apostles themselves--and of all of the Church's great missionaries prior to the "ecclesiogenesis" that sprung forth as a result of the Second Vatican Council.

As noted above, there are two inter-related reasons why parishes have lost parishioners in the past forty years.

First, the loss of parishioners in many places is the result of the abandonment of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition and actual warfare being waged against the Catholic Faith by active practitioners of perversion. I mean, why is it that Edward Cardinal Egan takes no action against parishes that recruit parishioners to walk in the annual parade of perversion (Saint Francis Xavier Church in Greenwich Village and Saint Paul's Church near Lincoln Center are two of the biggest offenders in this regard) while he seeks to penalize traditionally-minded priests who want to exercise their rights under Quo Primum to offer the Mass of Tradition exclusively? Why is it that those who promote persistence in Mortal Sin are retained in their pastoral positions while those who dissent from not one whit of anything contained in the Deposit Faith but who simply want to offer God the worship that He taught the Apostles to offer Him must be suspended and otherwise disciplined by Cardinal Egan?

Second, the lack of zeal for souls results in potential Catholic converts passing by our Catholic churches on a daily basis without giving a thought to entering, at least out of curiosity. Why should they? We have a pope who is a disciple of Father Hans Urs von Balthasar, who believed in the error of universal salvation. Why should people seek out the Church when the Church is not seeking them out?

Cardinal Egan and his auxiliary bishops and his priests should be out on the streets, pounding the sidewalks to give out Miraculous Medals and Green Scapulars and apologetics materials. They should be standing in subway stations and at bus stops give out Miraculous Medals and Green Scapulars and apologetics materials. Parish priests should be ordered to go door to door and apartment building to apartment building to seek out the lost sheep and to bring in those sheep who are outside of the One Sheepfold of Christ that is the Catholic Church. That is how "older" parishes are saved in order to serve the cause of the sanctification and eternal salvation of new souls in each succeeding generation, yes, even in the midst of shifting demographics.

Men, though, who no longer worship as Catholics worshipped for the better part of two millennia lose their apostolic zeal. They think as men think, not as God thinks. They are unwilling to take the chances that are required to win new souls for Our Lord and His Holy Church. They fear bad press. They fear being called anti-Semitic for seeking the conversion of Jews. They fear being called "insensitive" for seeking the conversion of the Protestants and Mormons and the Orthodox and Buddhists and Hindus and others. They fear being unpopular with men rather than fearing to displease God by their infidelity to the mission He gave the Eleven on Ascension Thursday:

Going, therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world. (Mt. 28:19-20)

No one has repealed this Divine injunction. Those who ignore it, however, are personally accountable for the devastation of the Church in her human elements and are personally responsible for the devastation of the souls who will die without ever having the benefit of the sacraments that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man in Our Lady's virginal and immaculate womb entrusted solely to the Catholic Church.

Consider the zeal for souls exhibited by the young Giovanni Bosco when he was but a teenager going to school in Chieri, Italy:

There were in John's class, at the school in Chieri, several Jews who were in difficulties about their Saturday's work. For them it was the Sabbath, when all work was forbidden. But the older boys used to laugh at them as if it were an extra vacation day. John, who saw that it was a question of conscience, used to send them a lit of the work given out, with the explanations. In consequence, they vowed him an eternal friendship, and one of them, who used to frequent the restaurant where John worked, became very intimate with him. One day this young fellow, whose name was Jonas, got mixed up in a school scrape and, anxious about the consequences, came to consult his friend.

"If you were a Christian," said John, "I should take you straight off to Confession, but that can't be done."

"Why not? We can go to Confession if we like."

"Perhaps, but you have no Sacrament of Penance, no power to forgive sins, no guarantee of secrecy."

"I will go to a Catholic priest if you like."

"You can't unless you are baptized and believe in Jesus Christ."

"What would they say at home?"

"If God calls you to this, He will protect you."

"What would you do if you were in my place?" asked the young Jew.

"I would begin to study the catechism," said John.

The advice was taken; John prayed. Light and conviction came to Jonas, but the catechism was discovered. Irate parents took it to the Rabbi and accused John of betraying the friendship and ruining the soul of their son. Both friends had a good deal to suffer; there were even threats of violence. Jonas had to leave home, but he stood firm in his determination to become a Catholic. In the end, friends came to his assistance, the young Jew was baptized and the tumult died down. Several others followed him into the Church. (F. A. Forbes, Saint John Bosco, reprinted by TAN Books and Publishers, Rockford, Illinois, pp. 25-27.)

The zeal for souls that motivated Don Bosco throughout his entire life is what should motivate our popes and cardinals and bishops and priests today. There would be no talk of closing parishes or schools, which would be instruments of promoting and not undermining the fullness of the Deposit of Faith that Our Lord entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church. There would only be talk of building more and more parishes and schools if the Church in her human elements cleaved jealously to the Immemorial Mass of Tradition to the missionary zeal for souls that promoted the Apostles to leave the Upper Room in Jerusalem to face all of the onslaughts of a hostile, disbelieving world. We can do no less today.

Although it seems unlikely that Pope Benedict XVI, a defender of the novelties of the Second Vatican Council and a follower of the New Theology of the likes of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac and Johnann Baptist Metz, will be the pope to consecrate Russia to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, we must pray for him to do so. One act of obedience to the Mother of God can fill our parishes once again with new children begotten in the baptismal font and strengthened by the chrism of Confirmation.

In the meantime, though, it is imperative for all Catholics to flee from the wolves in shepherds' clothing whose closing of parishes and schools is so symbolic of their contempt for the fullness of Catholic Tradition without compromise. We must seek out the Mass of the ages and the fullness of the Catholic Faith that is best expressed and protected therein in the catacombs, thinking nothing of human respect and everything of pleasing God by remaining steadfast in the form of worship and in the expression of the truths of the Faith that made possible the glories of Christendom itself.

We must continue to make reparation for our own sins, especially during this season of Lent, conscious of the fact that our sins are themselves responsible for adding to the problems of the Church and the world. And while we point out the infidelity of our ecclesiastical leaders, we must always pray for them so that they can recover the sensus Catholicus and thus fulfill the weighty responsibilities for the salvation of souls that have been entrusted to them as a consequence of the offices they hold. How can we expect them to be faithful in big things when we are so unfaithful in so many little things? We must do penance for ourselves--and for the sins of others, offering all to God through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, trusting completely that she will use whatever we give her for the restoration of Tradition in the Church and the Social Reign of Christ the King in the world.

Our Lady, Help of Christians, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Patrick, pray for us.

Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, pray for us.

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, pray for us.

Saint Ambrose, pray for us.

Saint Augustine, pray for us.

Saint Peter Canisius, pray for us.

Saint Francis de Sales, pray for us.

Saint Robert Bellarmine, pray for us.

Saint Francis Xavier, pray for us.

Saint Peter Claver, pray for us.

Saint Katherine Drexel, pray for us.

Saint Francis Solano, pray for us.

Saint John Bosco, pray for us.

Saint Juan Diego, pray for us.

Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe, pray for us.

Saint Philomena, pray for us.

Saint Therese Lisieux, pray for us.

Saint Isaac Jogues and Companions, pray for us.

Blessed Junipero Serra, pray for us.

Blessed Miguel Augustin Pro, pray for us.

Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, pray for us.

Blessed Pauline Jaricot, pray for us.

Blessed Francisco, pray for us.

Blessed Jacinta, pray for us.

Sister Lucia, pray for us.